February 2012

August 28, 2005

First, there was the Age of Faith – soaring cathedrals, a belief in a supreme deity, courageous saints containing the spread of evil. Then there was the Age of Reason – the era of the Enlightenment, the guidance of science and a belief that the mind could unravel all the mysteries of the universe.

Today, however, according to a number of learned books and a recent New Yorker article, we live in the Age of Bullshit. “We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production… Presidents, priests, politicians, laywers, reporters, corporate executives and countless others have taken to saying not what they actually believe, but what they want others to believe – not what is, but what works.” Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, by Laura Penny (Crown Publishers, NY)

Bullshit, we learn, is different from lying. A liar knows what he is saying to be false. A bullshitter, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care whether what he is saying is true or not – it’s what he can get away with.

According to Harry Frankfurt in On Bullshit(Princeton University Press, 2005), the quintessential example of bullshit occurred when Ludwig Wittgenstein visited a friend in hospital and asked her how she felt. She said she felt like a run-over dog. Wittgenstein was disgusted. “You don’t know a dog that has been run over feels like.” Wittgenstein’s friend wasn’t lying. She was bullshitting. According to Frankfurt, bullshitting has become “one of the most salient features of our culture.”

Chronic truth decay

The proliferation of bullshit is one of the principal reasons I put so much emphasis in my books and workshops on telling the truth, the truth as best you can tell it, the authentic truth. Becoming identified as a bullshitter will devastatingly reduce your chances of being an effective leader of change.

Why is there so much bullshit today? The books have difficulty in putting their finger on any single reason. Frankfurt suggests diplomatically and optimistically that since there is so much more communication generally, perhaps the proportion that is bullshit hasn’t increased. Penny says that “our era is unique by virtue of its sheer scale, its massive budget, its seemingly unlimited capability to send bullshit hurtling rapidly over the globe.”

Politicians and advertisers are cited as champions of bullshit, addictively "painting the lawn green." Their slogans wash over us: "You deserve a break today." "I'd like to teach the world to sing." "Mission accomplished." "We are fighting a war on poverty." The US emerges as the champion nation of bullshitting because ours is “much more ubiquitous, well-funded, and outrageous” than any other nation’s.

Frankfurt suggests that bullshitting is also encouraged by the perceived responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything. This leads inevitably to “the lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality.”

Post-modernist attacks on truth have also, it is said, had a hand in encouraging bullshit. If we cannot ever really know for sure what is true, then at least we can be sincere. As Blackburn however points out, knowledge about ourselves is “elusively insubstantial.” Hence a claim to be speaking the truth about ourselves is in great danger of being itself a prize example of bullshit.

For instance, distinguished literary critics, including the super-subtle Lionel Trilling in his otherwise brilliant book, Sincerity and Authenticity, have cited with approval Polonius’s advice to his son in Shakespeare's Hamlet: “This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” This advice is, to be sure, persuasively phrased, but we should get a hint about its veracity from the fact that Shakespeare puts the words in the mouth of a doddering old fool. In fact, when you think about it for more than a second, you realize that it cannot possibly be true. So whether or not Polonius believes his advice, he is bullshitting!

How to avoid bullshitting

Is there a way out? Can we be sincere and tell the truth about ourselves? Is it possible to tell the truth? What I advise in my workshops, and what I say in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, is to proceed as though it is possible to think disinterestedly and to do one's best to present one's conclusions without significant distortion.

These assumptions may be hard to justify to a philosopher, but they contribute to a form of communication that is immensely useful. The assumptions constitute in effect a set of enabling conventions. Whether or not you believe in the enabling conventions – for example that truth can be known – telling a story in this way requires no life-long philosophical commitment to the belief, only a willingness to adopt this position for a limited time and purpose.

Similarly, playing the game of tennis doesn’t necessitate adopting the position that our lifelong aim is to defeat our opponent. But if we want to play a good game of tennis on a particular day, it does require that we adopt the conventions of tennis and try to defeat our opponent on that particular day. We cannot play an excellent game of tennis if we are all the time questioning the conventions of the game, or commenting on the evolution of the game, or wondering whether we should be trying to defeat our opponent. After the game is over, we may sit back and have philosophical discussions about whether the conventions of tennis make sense, or whether other conventions would be preferable, or whether we really enjoy trying to defeat our best friend at tennis, but for the duration of the game, these questions have to be set aside in order to play an excellent game of tennis. Then the game can proceed.

So it is with storytelling. The performance of storytelling requires the storyteller to accept the conventions of storytelling at least for the duration of the performance. In performance, the storyteller is certain, fearless and relentless in presenting things “as they really are.” While the role can be useful and even thrilling, it can hardly be permanent. For better or worse, human beings cannot remain in a permanent state of certainty, fearlessness and relentlessness. There is no reliable evidence to support the storyteller’s claim to the disinterested expression of truth. The insouciance required to ignore what everyone knows and to carry the listeners along cannot be maintained for very long, and master storytellers know the limits. The storytelling performance is thus a sprint, not a marathon.

This is not to say that the leader as storyteller cannot acknowledge human inadequacies. We know that much of the time we are unreliable, inconsistent or uncertain. We are victims of our ambitions. We may deceive ourselves for reasons of sentimentality or friendship or vanity or self-interest. We remain a morass of unsatisfied appetites. These inadequacies can however be seen as a regrettable layer of imperfection over fundamental soundness. We never despair. We’re not impotent, merely weak. We can grow stronger. We can not only aspire to what is true and worthwhile: we can even succeed in our dreams. We can recognize a new experience or new possibilities through a story. By communicating that experience or those possibilities, we can ratchet up our own, and our audience’s, understanding.

Above all, one must make a determined effort to tell the authentic truth, even though everyone around is bullshitting. This isn't easy. In fact it’s terrifying to think how many things can go wrong in an effort to present something clearly and accurately. Perhaps our memory is playing tricks on us. Maybe we have difficulty expressing what we see. Our insights may lack edge. We may have been misled. Even if we have none of these fears, the situation is hardly any better, since the listeners may have the same fears about us. How can we deal with doubts that we cannot even in principle know?

Presenting the truth as we see it is a capability that is available to everyone. Such competence is no more problematic than being able to see what we see with our own eyes. The storyteller does not have to be omniscient. It is the everyday form of competence of knowing what we need to know for this particular talk.

So why not join us in committing to authentic storytelling, and help fight bullshit?

August 25, 2005

The organization will celebrate its centennial in 2008 and my correspondent had been asked to compile a history of the institution to commemorate the event. He wanted to to find an attractive and palatable literary vehicle/style/genre to communicate what is of itself an interesting history. He was toying with the possibility of organizing the history of the university as a story or as many stories. He asked whether I saw possibilities in using this approach?

My reply:

Organizational histories can be a tricky challenge. Often there are so many interests bearing down on the writing that it's tough to produce something that's both true and interesting. There's a passage in my co-authored book, Storytelling in Organizations (Butterworth Heinemann), where Larry Prusak had a few blunt words to say about the subject:

"People sometimes ask me how to approach writing an oral history of an organization. What should they do and what shouldn’t they do? Sometimes I tell them what Voltaire said about history. “It’s a pack of tricks played on the dead.” If you can find people still alive who were around when the organization was created and who can really talk about it, my advice is to interview these people and tape the conversations on video. Talk to people who have stories to tell, and let the viewers make their own decision as to what this means. I usually advise them not to write it. There are firms that write histories for other firms. But almost no-one reads them, because we know they are not true. It doesn’t accord with our own sense of how an organization would work. Country histories are different. Professional historians often write really well and honestly, and readers agree that, yes, that must have been the way it was. But corporate histories are different. I’ve read a number of them. They’re mostly public relations, that is to say, bunk, and people know it. So I’d recommend interviewing people and letting them talk. Then others can watch the tapes and make up their own minds as to what they mean."

That's one approach, which may or may not suit the need. If there is a requirement to actually write a volume, then telling it as a story is certainly the way to go. If one can find a coherent point of view for the story, something that reveals the true spirit and soul of the university, this would help to give it focus.

It may also be useful to have a frank discussion up front with the authorities about the issue of truth. If the book is to be simply a PR job, then it may leave your sponsors very happy but will likely result in a book that is never read. If on the other hand the book is to be frank account of both the joys and woes of the story of the organization, with some lively writing about the impact of the lives on specific individuals, including the setbacks, then it may offend some people but it just might end up being worthwhile.

August 24, 2005

I will be giving a full-day storytelling masterclass in Chicago on September 29, 2005, sponsored by the ARK Group.

In this masterclass, participants will learn how to use stories to handle the main challenges of transformational leadership, communicate complex ideas so as to be easily understood, spark action even from skeptical audiences, build trust by communicating who you are, enhance your brand authentically from within the organization, understand values and how to transmit them authentically, create high performance teams and communities of practice, transmit knowledge, both explicit and tacit, tame the grapevine, and lead people into the future.

In this masterclass, participants will learn how to use stories to handle the main challenges of transformational leadership, communicate complex ideas so as to be easily understood, spark action even from skeptical audiences, build trust by communicating who you are, enhance your brand authentically from within the organization, understand values and how to transmit them authentically, create high performance teams and communities of practice, transmit knowledge, both explicit and tacit, tame the grapevine, and lead people into the future.

This is the first publicly-accessible masterclass that the ARK Group is putting on in the US, and it is shaping up with some great innovations. For once, we have a whole day, compared to the half-day that I’ve been doing in the European masterclasses. And my recent whirlwind tour through Australia and NZ (21 workshops/presentations in less than three weeks) has given me the chance to refine some modules and develop new ones.

The workshop will feature a case study: Participants will get to practice the full array of narrative techniques on a brand new case study developed specially for this masterclass. In this fascinating story of a firm in transition, participants will get to see what’s involved in getting change in a difficult situation, including not only springboard stories but also all the other narrative patterns described in The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

It will include 12 ways to create high-performance teams: the conventional wisdom (e.g. Richard Hackman’s Leading Teams) is that management can’t do any more than create the conditions for teams, not actually generate high-performance teams. In this module, you’ll learn not only why this is wrong but also: twelve things that you actually can do to generate high-performance teams.

Three narrative dimensions of brands: The idea that brands have something to do with narrative is now becoming quite commonplace. But did you know that there are three different narrative dimensions of brands? Participants will explore these three different dimensions in the case study.

Innovation: my workshops in the past have focused on communicating a change idea that you already have. In this module, we’ll work on the prior question: how do you come up with change idea? You’ll learn how narrative techniques can help in this area too.

Seven crucial steps to perform the story: Telling the right story is important, but just as important is how you perform it. In this module, you’ll learn

The HR dimension of storytelling: smart organizations are realizing that narrative is a core competence of an organization, and are incorporating this into recruitment and staffing policies.

PowerPoint: In this module, you’ll learn to stop complaining about PowerPoint and start using its awesome capacity to reinforce your narrative.

As pointed out in the branding chapter of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, the Financial Times has an article today by Kim Thomas pointing out the value of finding the customer’s story, this time, through the use of anthropologists.

The idea of using social scientists was pioneered at Xerox PARC and reflected in Julian Orr’s book, Talking About Machines.

The idea has resurfaced as big technology companies believe anthropologists can discover the story that remains undiscovered by traditional quantitative research methods. Xerox researchers today use a technique known as ethnomethodology, which involves visiting workplaces and observing working practices without preconceptions.

Peter Tolmie, the area manager of Xerox’s work practice technology group in France, says: “Standard marketing research and statistical data is often frustratingly shallow when you want to move towards designing technology.”

The advantage of using anthropologists is that they can uncover the customer's story. Says Intel researcher, Ms Bell: “I’m always looking for the ethnographic story that totally turns your world on its ear, the thing that challenges some really basic core assumption you have made.”

According to Thomas, Microsoft is another company trying hard to understand the customer perspective. Shannon Banks, a UK-based product planner who heads a global team looking at the needs of information workers, says that initial “broad exploratory research” may uncover “pain points and unarticulated customer needs that they do not even recognise”.

The results of the Chinese research by Intel?

- findings about Chinese parents’ concern that computers might distract their children from learning Mandarin led Intel designers to launch this year a PC that has a touch-sensitive screen that allows users to write in Mandarin.

- the significance in China of locks and keys as manifestations of authority meant installing physical locking mechanisms, visible from elsewhere in the room, rather than software locks were popular with parents.

I had a query from a participant in my recent New Zealand masterclass about launching an organizational storytelling community. What are the lessons of experience on how to do this well?

Interesting question! Some relevant lessons from the experience of launching storytelling communities in Washington, San Diego, and Boston include:

- it's good to get together a nucleus of "champions" and “enthusiasts” to get the community launched; this nucleus can provide the energy to get things going.

- it's hard to get a community going purely online. You may need face to face meetings to keep momentum going. The Washington community meets once a month.

- find a convenient place where you can meet regularly. If you have to keep looking for a new location, this can be a drag.

- agree on the group's focus: decide on whether you want to have an organizational focus to the storytelling or not. Storytelling is a huge subject. If you embrace every aspect of storytelling, the group may get lost.

- keep a watch out for gender issues, which have a way of bubbling to the surface in storytelling groups.

- be inclusive and allow alternative points of view; be careful not to locked into thinking that there is "one right way" to tell stories.

- share the leadership. If the group is dependent on a single person, it can be vulnerable to collapse if that individual is unable to continue in the role.

August 18, 2005

As pointed out in The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, understanding a story depends on the context in which the story is told, as illustrated in this courtroom joke from a book called Pilot Your Life by Ron Shaw:

An Amish man named Smith was injured when he and his horse were struck by a car at an intersection. Smith sued the driver. In court, he was cross-examined by the driver's lawyer.

Lawyer: "Mr. Smith, you've testified all about your injuries. But according to the accident report, you told the investigating officer at the scene that you were not injured. What about that?"

Smith: "Well, let me explain. When the officer arrived at the scene, he first looked at my horse. He said, 'Looks like he has a broken leg.' And then he took out his gun and shot the horse. Then he came up to me and asked how I was doing. I immediately responded, 'I'm fine! I'm fine!'"

As indicated in The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, there is a close relation between narrative and science. A very interesting article by Roald Hoffman developing this idea has appeared in the current issue of the American Scientist. The connection between experiment and story has often been remarked: an account of an experiment is fairly obviously a story. But Hoffman goes further and points that even the most complex theory is in essence, what else but a story...

Storied Theory

By Roald Hoffmann

Published in American Scientist: July-August 2005

Volume: 93 Number: 4 Page: 308

DOI: 10.1511/2005.4.308

Science and stories are not only compatible, they're inseparable, as shown by Einstein's classic 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

Science seems to be afraid of storytelling, perhaps because it associates narrative with long, untestable yarns. Stories are perceived as "just" literature. Worse, stories are not reducible to mathematics, so they are unlikely to impress our peers.

This fear is misplaced for two reasons. First, in paradigmatic science, hypotheses have to be crafted. What are alternative hypotheses but competing narratives? Invent them as fancifully as you can. Sure, they ought to avoid explicit violations of reality (such as light acting like a particle when everyone knows it's a wave?), but censor those stories lightly. There is time for experiment--by you or others--to discover which story holds up better.

The second reason not to fear a story is that human beings do science. A person must decide what molecule is made, what instrument built to measure what property. Yes, there are facts to begin with, facts to build on. But facts are mute. They generate neither the desire to understand, nor appeals for the patronage that science requires, nor the judgment to do A instead of B, nor the will to overcome a seemingly insuperable failure. Actions, small or large, are taken at a certain time by human beings--who are living out a story.

Better Theory Through Stories

One might think that experiments are more sympathetic than theories to storytelling, because an experiment has a natural chronology and an overcoming of obstacles (see my article, "Narrative," in the July-August 2000 American Scientist). However, I think that narrative is indivisibly fused with the theoretical enterprise, for several reasons.

One, scientific theories are inherently explanatory. In mathematics it's fine to trace the consequences of changing assumptions just for the fun of it. In physics or chemistry, by contrast, one often constructs a theoretical framework to explain a strange experimental finding. In the act of explaining something, we shape a story. So C exists because A leads to B leads to C--and not D.

Two, theory is inventive. This statement is certainly true for chemistry, which today is more about synthesis than analysis and more about creation than discovery. As Anne Poduska, a graduate student in my group, pointed out to me, "theory has a greater opportunity to be fanciful, because you can make up molecules that don't (yet) exist."

Three, theory often provides a single account of how the world works--which is what a story is. In general, theoretical papers do not lay out several hypotheses. They take one and, using a set of mathematical mappings and proof techniques, trace out the consequences.

Theories are world-making.

Finally, comparing theory with experiment provides a natural ending.

There is a beginning to any theory--some facts, some hypotheses. After setting the stage, developing the readers' interest, engaging them in the fundamental conflict, there is the moment of (often experimental) truth: Will it work? And if that test of truth is not at hand, perhaps the future holds it.

The theorist who restates a problem without touching on an experimental result of some consequence, or who throws out too many unverifiable predictions, will lose credibility and, like a long-winded raconteur, the attention of his or her audience. Coming back to real ground after soaring on mathematical wings gives theory a narrative flow.

Let me analyze a theoretical paper to show how this storytelling imperative works. Not just any paper, but a classic appropriate to the centennial of Albert Einstein's great 1905 papers....

To view the rest of the article analyzing Einstein's paper, with illustrations:

August 17, 2005

What’s the secret to high-speed learning? Most discussions of learning are very cerebral i.e. all about brain, but the reality is that high-speed learning is all about a combination of brain and heart. We learn quickly when we are passionate about learning, slowly when we're not. If this is true, and I believe it is, for both formal and informal learning, then a primary focus in sparking high-speed learning has to be on engaging the heart. This is one reason why The Leader's Guide to Storytelling points out that abstract, cerebral approaches to learning are very ineffective, and why narrative is important for high-speed learning: it can engage the heart.

Another reason why the heart is important is that there are two types of learning - one that takes place within the existing set of assumptions and one that involves a change of a basic set of assumptions. The latter is the more important kind of learning and it's the harder one to accomplish because the passion to learn is generally absent.

There was an interesting article on this recently in Fast Company about health care. It pointed out that the basic problem of the health care system is not better high-tech medicine but rather the inability to get behavioral change. A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral. That is, they're sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control: i.e. too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise. Using conventional approaches to learning, 90% of patients don't change their lifestyle and are back in surgery, intensive care, or the morgue pretty soon. The amount of money at stake is large: about 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. Unless you can change the passion to learn to live more sensibly, people aren't willing to change their basic assumptions.

The same thing happens when you're trying to get an IBM, or Xerox, or Kodak, or the World Bank, to undertake a basic change in corporate strategy - unless you can generate the passion to learn and undertake basic change, it doesn't happen. And moreover, in these cases, it's a matter of getting large numbers of people to change their basic assumptions all at once, which is much more difficult, because the status quo constitutes mutual reinforcement for everyone not to change. In such settings, those proposing change tend to get classified as heretics, outsiders, or worse, in order to protect the status quo from change.

By contrast, changes within a given set of assumptions happen quite easily once the learner is motivated. e.g. since 4 pm yesterday, I have been struggling to figure out how get my Dell Inspirion 6000 computer to talk to Canon Optura 20 camcorder. It’s true that there's an overwhelming amount of information out there about such problems, and it hasn't been easy, but once I'm strongly motivated to solve the problem, the Web enables me to find the needle in the haystack, something that was not before possible. Getting to the solution moreover doesn't involve any change of my basic assumptions. It doesn't involve a change in my lifestyle.

Similarly, within a corporate setting, innovation and learning within the given assumptions of the firm happen relatively easily. Big companies with deep pockets win the battles of innovation at the margin without much difficulty. It's when you get to basic, disruptive change, that the big firms have a major problem, as Clayton Christensen has eloquently pointed out in his books.

One reason why discussions of learning get fixated on the brain, and largely miss the heart, is by framing the current overall issue of learning as one of the dealing with the infoglut. The reality is that the infoglut is (almost) irrelevant to the problems of learning: the Web has made it infinitely easier to find stuff, once we are set out with passion and persistence to learn something.

True, people feel overwhelmed. But why? There are several reasons, not all related to learning.

One is work pressure, as companies try to do more with less, and people are squeezed in between. A charitable interpretation of this phenomenon would be that companies are trying to figure out how far they can squeeze their people before they self-destruct. This is not very intelligent management behavior.

Another is that companies try to solve their own cost problems by making clients do the work - automated call centers instead of helpful human beings. Again a very short-sighted approach. Smart companies make things easier for customers, not more difficult.

Another is that the pace of change of new technology means that constant learning is now de rigueur and some people haven't made that change in assumptions. This is a genuine learning problem.

Another is that we're still learning the etiquette of the new technology e.g. sending a message to 300 people instead of the 3 who really need it.

Finally, there is the fact that in the US, people live to work, rather than work to live. They seem to like working for its own sake. By contrast, in France, people work less and are (statistically) more productive. They like to enjoy life as well as work. It's a life style choice. (see Paul Krugman in the NYT on July 29. I leave it to you to say which country has things in better balance.

The bottom line from The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: high-speed learning runs on passion as well smarts. Engaging people’s hearts is a sine qua non for high-speed learning, and how else to do that except through narrative?

August 13, 2005

FOR HR LEADERS, organisational storytelling is a useful way to help implement change and growth in their business, according to Stephen Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.

Although it is still an emerging discipline in HR, Denning said HR professionals can benefit from storytelling because it’s an effective way to communicate with people.

“The ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential leadership skill for coping with, and getting business results in, the turbulent world of the 21st century,” he said.

Storytelling is a flexible way of communicating strange, complex new ideas and getting people into action quickly and enthusiastically, he added.

“When leaders have to move an organisation from good to great, they find that the traditional management techniques of command-and-control don't work.

“Instead of command and control, leaders need to engage and enrol: storytelling is uniquely adapted to this challenge, because human beings tend to think in stories, and base their actions on stories,” Denning said.

He has worked with some of the world’s largest companies including Coca-Cola Amatil, IBM, McDonalds, the US Army and the Australian Federal Treasury.

“It enables managers to lead organisations into the future ethically and successfully by increasing the communication within organisations – becoming an essential skill all managers should develop,” he said.

Speaking at a recent Humanagement event on leading transformational change, Denning said storytelling can be used by HR professionals to improve the own interactions or to effect change in the organisation, enhance the performance of existing leaders as well as identify and train future leaders.

“The emerging discipline of narrative deals with leadership more than management. Management concerns means rather than ends. Leadership on the other hand deals with ends more than means,” he said.

“It concerns issues where there is no agreement on underlying assumptions and goals – or where there is a broad agreement, but the assumptions and goals are heading for failure.

“In fact, the principal task of leadership is to create a new consensus about the goals to be pursued and how to achieve them.

“Once there is such a consensus, then managers can get on with the job of implementing those goals. It is essentially a task of persuasion,” Denning said.

HR professionals can help executives and managers to understand their organisation's story by becoming better listeners, especially to staff and clients. They must also pay attention to the discrepancies between the stories that are heard.

“If what you hear is not to your liking, think long and hard before assuming that the staff on the front lines or the clients are wrong,” he said.

“If you don't like what you're hearing, the task is not to change the market's idea of who you are but actually to change who you are. And that can take a generation.”

One of the keys to successful organisational storytelling is understanding that different narrative patterns have different impacts.

“Grasping which narrative pattern is suitable for which leadership challenge is key to making effective use of the power of storytelling,” he said.

Then it’s “simply a matter of getting started and practising. Storytelling is a performance art and one acquires skill by practice”.

Storytelling has been around for thousands of years in one shape or another, however it is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in the corporate world. This is largely due to the work of Stephen Denning, a former executive with the World Bank and now author and consultant in the world of storytelling.

His latest book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, examines how leaders at any level, from the CEO, middle management or the frontline, can lead by using stories to effect change. The book shows how storytelling can help in handling the principal and most difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. He elaborates upon this with a number of case studies from companies such as Coca Cola, The Body Shop, IBM and Starbucks.

Denning includes an interesting chapter on taming the grapevine of gossip and rumour. He believes conventional management techniques are generally impotent and advocates that storytelling can neutralise untrue rumours by satirising them out of existence. All in all, the book is a refreshing read on how to apply an ages-old art to the corporate world.

If it’s possible…in your own words, what is story?

A story – a synonym for narrative – is an account of a set of events that are causally related. One could fill a whole library with the academic discussion swirling around such a simple common-sense notion.

For instance, some have suggested that “story” should be defined in the narrower sense of a well-told story, with a protagonist, a plot, and a turning point leading to a resolution and so on.

In common usage, however, “story” tends to be used in the broad sense that I have indicated. There are many different types of story. Some variations are more useful for some purposes than others. There are probably many variations that haven’t yet been identified.

If we start out with predetermined ideas of what a “real story” is, we may end up missing useful forms of narrative. Hence a broad definition, along the lines that I suggest, that is in line with common usage, seems the best way to go.

I imagine some people would ask, “Why do stories matter in today’s world?”

It’s a bit like asking: why does analysis matter in today’s world? This is one of the principal ways in which human beings think and communicate. Most of our communications take the form of stories. If you want to understand communication, you have to understand story.

“Organizational storytelling” seems to be big business nowadays.Is it a fad or does this method of communicating information have “shelf life” and “legs?”

Narrative has always been big business. Just think about marketing, advertising, therapy, management, news, entertainment and so on. You end up with storytelling comprising more than $1 trillion annually in the US economy. (See The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, Foreword.[i])

It is just that story hasn’t been recognized as such. We’ve been ignoring what is staring us in the face. What’s happening now is that story is being recognized for what it is – a huge part of the current business world.

Storytelling has always been with us in business, and will always be with us in business. It’s just a question of whether you want to use it clumsily and unintelligently, or cleverly and effectively.

Why would a company care about story?

Most of the difficult challenges that organizational leaders face today – sparking change, communicating who you are, managing the brand, transmitting values, catalyzing collaboration, sharing knowledge, taming the grapevine, communicating the future – are ill-suited to conventional abstract command-and-control approaches to communication, but are well-adapted to narrative techniques.

The question for companies becomes: do you want to be an organization where the managers can’t spark change, can’t communicate who they are, can’t manage the brand, can’t transmit values, can’t catalyze collaboration, can’t tame the grapevine and can’t communicate the future? If so, then maintain the current conventional abstract practices of communication in the way you run and staff the organization, without resort to narrative.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in having an organization where the people can handle these central leadership challenges, then you really have to start thinking systematically about making narrative capacity a core competence for the staff of the organization. Storytelling has implications for all aspects of running and staffing an organization.

Why would an audience care about a company’s story?

Often they don’t, because the company doesn’t know how to tell its story.

When a firm knows how to tell its story, it can enable the audience to understand and trust the company. When the company is a competent storyteller, the company’s story can be a major part of a firm’s brand, which can be worth billions of dollars to the company. A number of recent books have begun documenting the narrative aspects of branding, including those by Larry Vincent (Legendary Brands) and Douglas Holt (How Brands become Icons), although there is still a lot more that needs to be said about this important subject.

What are the benefits to an organization in creating a short film story?

Much of my experience has been with face-to-face storytelling. Creating a film story poses somewhat different challenges. By contrast with oral storytelling, film has both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, you have, first, the spectacular visual effects and transformations that film makes possible. Second, you can exploit the emotive power of music to enhance the impact. Third, the medium can exploit wonderful non-linear techniques of storytelling that are not available to the oral storyteller. And finally, the medium enables the storyteller to reach potentially vast numbers of people with a single video.

There are however some disadvantages to film. First, whereas oral storytelling is interactive and can be adjusted on the fly in response to the audience reaction, film is frozen in time, and grinds on, regardless of the audience response. Hence film requires clever anticipation of audience reaction to be really effective. Second, given the vast number of inauthentic, and arguably deceptive, commercials that people are routinely subjected to on a daily basis, corporate movies tend to encounter an initial barrier of skepticism and cynicism that can be tricky to overcome. Thirdly, the audience tends to have exacting production expectations of a film, in part driven by the standards set by commercials where millions of dollars are spent on perfecting a single 30-second spot. Meeting these expectations can be expensive.

If the filmmaker can overcome these hurdles, then the impact of a film can be extraordinary.

You mentioned:“I was startled when I stumbled on the discovery that an appropriately told story had the power to do what rigorous analysis couldn’t – to communicate a strange new idea easily and naturally and quickly get people into enthusiastically positive action.”Do you have a favorite story to tell about that experience?

What was amazing to me is that my success in communicating the idea of knowledge sharing at the World Bank in 1996-1997, and in re-energizing a huge group of people, came not from crafting a superior chart, or giving people reasons, but simply telling a story. I told a story about people who lived the knowledge sharing idea and how things happened in a real life situation. The difficulties of communication seemed to dissolve.

The presentation was easier to deliver. I was talking about people, real people, from within the organization, people who were known, who could be talked to and who could explain whether this was the way it actually happened.

And the presentation was easier to listen to. It was more interesting. It was simpler to follow. Hearing the idea of knowledge sharing in relation to a story made everything come to life. We were learning about people and what they said and did and how it led to their success. Suddenly everything was more easily discussed and understood.

In the early days, I had been using stories to support the analytic framework for change. I had been assuming that the main work of explanation was being done by the analytic scaffolding. But at the end of 1997, when I took away most of the analytical scaffolding, I found that the story still worked, perhaps even better than when the analytical scaffolding was present.

I asked myself: How could this be possible? I had been educated for decades to think that analytical reasoning is the epitome of thinking, and that stories are of no more than secondary importance. I was convinced that any success that I achieved at school was rooted in my ability to think analytically, to see the relations between concepts and to be able to explain them. A similar experience in my working life had confirmed the same world-view. Analytical was good: anecdotal was bad.

This fundamental assumption made it difficult for me even to imagine any alternative. And yet here, in my day-to-day living, I was confronted with unmistakable signs of the opposite phenomenon. The more I concentrated on the analytics, the more I ran into difficulty and resistance. The more I put the analytic thinking to one side and instead put forward the story, the easier things seemed to be. It was startling.

Share with us a little bit about the ROI of stories within organizations.

“What’s the ROI of storytelling?” is often the first question on business people’s lips storytelling is mentioned. In dealing with such a question, the first thing to consider is whether the question is genuine. Often the request to quantify benefits is merely a pretext for taking no action, or an indirect way of making a negative statement. When the response to a request for measurable benefits is followed by a request for yet more measurements and studies, then beware! Measurement has value when it is provoked by a genuine attempt to understand the consequences of action, and when we are willing to act on the basis of what we find.

But let’s assume the request is genuine. Let’s look at the ROI of storytelling. Storytelling is about making managers more effective in what they do. So what do managers do? The first point to realize that for managers – and indeed most people in the knowledge economy – talk is work. Henry Mintzberg's classic, The Nature of Managerial Work, showed that talking comprises 78 percent of managers actually do with their time.If we can learn how to talk more effectively, we can become much more productive.

Where storytelling gets the message across more effectively, the incremental cost of is zero, or close to zero, and so the ROI is massive.[ii] Moreover communicating through stories usually means talking more succinctly, so that the cost in terms of executive and staff time is actually lower than ineffective talk.

If using stories are effective, why has it taken so long for companies to start embracing this format for communicating information?

It will take a while to reverse two and a half thousand years of bad-mouthing of narrative, that began when Plato banned the storytellers and poets from his rational Republic, and accelerated ever since Descartes established the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition.

How could people be so blind, particularly when both Plato and Descartes were both themselves great storytellers?

Well, it’s like asking: how come people in the 19th Century imagined that thinking about sex was a rare and dubious phenomenon? Along comes Sigmund Freud, who points out that most people think about sex all the time, and then everyone says, “Oh my gosh, of course! How could we ever have thought otherwise?”

Most people think what they have been told to think about story, not the evidence of their own eyes and ears. Storytelling is a huge phenomenon, but we’ve been told that it’s not important, so people can’t see what’s staring them in the face.

I often interview executives of organizations.It usually takes about 20 minutes until they start opening up and telling me what they really do, as opposed to some “corporate brochure” they have memorized.They begin talking in “stories” and from the heart. It shows that stories are “embedded” in us.What’s your take on that?

Same as yours. People have been schooled to act in a certain way. We have got into very bad habits in organizations, talking to each other in the “foreign language” of abstractions. It takes a while for people to relax and do what they do very naturally and easily in a social setting, i.e. start telling stories.

I have found customer testimonials are a great way to capture stories about companies.In a way, customers sometimes tell the company story better than the company itself. Any thoughts on the truth of that?

It’s a question of credibility. Customers often have more credibility than the company, given centuries of unreliable sales pitches by organizations. It’s been estimated that in a modern society, the average person is subjected to 5,000 commercials per day: many of these commercials are known – on arrival – to be of dubious credibility.

Customers (generally) have no axes to grind, no agendas to pursue, no slants to slide down. Unfortunately, the same can’t always be said about companies.

You’ve mentioned that an organization’s knowledge is contained in its stories.What do you mean by that?

Knowledge lies in three places. (1) in abstractions: i.e. principles, theorems, axioms, etc. This is what we learn in school. It is important, but it is widely known and hence not commercially valuable per se. (2) tacit knowledge: what our bodies know but we can’t explain. We know how to ride a bicycle but we can’t explain the physics. Thus we know more than we can tell. This kind of knowledge is hard to communicate. (3) narratives, where most of the high-value, expert understanding in an organization is located. Through stories, we can tell more than we know. When we tell a story, a lot of our knowledge is unwittingly revealed. If you want to find the high-value knowledge in an organization, then look for the stories.

How can you tell a compelling story using “fantastic financial information”?What are some easy ways to translate data into stories?

Aristotle was generally right about the elements of a compelling story – hero or heroine, plot, beginning, middle, end, turning point etc. Nothing new here, as Robert McKee points out in his book about the movies, Story. It’s just the context may be different from what Aristotle was talking about. The narrative principles of telling a compelling story are the same.

But storytelling is both an art and discipline. There is art – the aesthetic choices to be made about what will, or will not, appeal to the potential audience. And there is the discipline – the possibility of drawing on what we know about stories – the discipline of storytelling: i.e. what kinds of stories work for what purposes? There is one set of principles for entertainment storytelling and for that purpose, Aristotle and Robert McKee make a lot of sense. For organizational storytelling, the object isn’t to entertain, but to achieve a business purpose. This kind of storytelling also has its principles which are different. That’s what The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling is all about – the discipline of business storytelling. What works? And what doesn’t work, and why?

Great leaders have always had has an instinctive, intuitive understanding of how to exploit narrative. But once the discipline is revealed, it’s no longer the exclusive property of great born leaders: anyone can become master the relevant narrative techniques and become a leader.

If you were to look in your “crystal ball,” what role does story play for companies in the future?

Story has always played an important role in companies – it’s just that they didn’t recognize it. At present, smart firms are starting to make narrative a core competence for the staff in their organization. It begins to affect everything the organization does – strategy, brands, knowledge, values, recruitment, staffing and so on. This phenomenon is already happening. The phenomenon will become more widespread. As always, some laggards will be slow in getting it, but over time they will see the cost to their business effectiveness. Using narrative is steadily becoming a normal aspect of running and staffing organization. Fairly soon, people will wonder how it could ever have been otherwise.

Is there one “secret” you could share with us that would summarize your efforts in using stories as tools to communicate, what would it be?

No. Organizational storytelling has many facets, most of which are not widely known. Thus storytelling isn’t a single gadget or technique or trick, but rather a discipline. As Peter Senge said, a discipline is “a body of theory and technique that must be studied and mastered to be put into practice. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies. As with any discipline, from playing the piano to electrical engineering, some people have an innate ‘gift’ but anyone can develop proficiency through practice.”

I would be doing the discipline of storytelling a disservice if I said there was only one secret, tool or trick to it all.Read The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling and you’ll find large numbers of “secrets”!

[i] I cite Deidre McCloskey who has calculated that persuasion constitutes more than a quarter of the US GNP: McCloskey, D. D. and A. Klamer (1995) American Economic Review, Vol. 85, No. 2, 195.).

[ii] The only incremental cost is the cost of learning to talk more effectively. Since all human beings spontaneously learn how to tell stories from a young age, the process of upgrading adults’ storytelling capacity happens very rapidly.

Thomas Clifford, a veteran corporate filmmaker, helps businesses realize their potential by using the documentary format. By finding and capturing authentic stories in a thoughtful and intelligent manner, Clifford creates a memorable experience for audiences everywhere. From individuals to Fortune 500 organizations, his award-winning work has helped some of the nation's largest companies tell their story in a competitive marketplace. Deloitte, Honeywell, Loctite, St. Francis Hospital, UCONN and many others have tapped Tom's talents to shape their mission and vision. Go to Tom's website, http://www.DirectorTom.com